‘All I can do is knit and purl,’ Lucy says. ‘I’ve only ever done scarves. But I’m wanting to do something a bit more intricate. Any chance you could lend me a hand?’

‘Reckon I could. Depends on how intricate, though.’

‘I’ve got a pattern here.’ Lucy fumbles in her handbag. She pulls out a piece of paper that has been folded into four. Its seams are worn and the corners dog-eared, as though she’s been unfolding it and re-folding it and passing it in and out of her handbag again and again. She hands it to Flo.

Flo scans the pattern, and raises her eyebrows at Lucy. ‘Knitted knockers?’ she asks, a smirk twitching her upper lip.

‘Oh I know!’ Lucy groans. She covers her face with her hands, slides her fingers apart so she can catch Flo’s eye, and begins to speak in a wailing rush. It’s like she’s trying to mask the awkward intimacy of her words by jostling them from her mouth, making it hard to keep up with everything she’s saying, but Flo catches the gist of it: they’re making Lucy see a psychologist because she nearly killed herself trying to save an octopus and now her psychologist reckons she should knit herself a pair of knockers as a way of coming to terms with everything. ‘The thing is, the pattern’s a bit complex so I need to learn to knit properly …’ Lucy finishes, and Flo can hear the ellipsis hang in the air like a question mark.

Flo’s quiet for a moment. She doesn’t quite know how to deal with this barrage of information. This type of conversation is new territory for them: up until this point, Lucy hasn’t really spoken to Flo about her body, about her breasts or lack thereof, except in passing. Until now, their friendship has been confined to more practical things: those octopuses, and they also did a batch of apricot jam together, not long after Lucy was discharged and just after Poppy had left, and also some tomato chutney a few weeks back. Lucy is blushing furiously, and Flo realises that she’s blushing too. It’s as though she feels Lucy’s shame as if it were her own. This shared blush makes Flo realise how similar they are.

Took your time realising, you dingbat, she imagines Gray scoffing from the living room. Would’ve thought you’d have noticed it when she showed up that night and asked to help with the octopuses. Didn’t you realise that she did it in exactly the same way you did, years earlier?

Exactly the way Flo had done, years earlier, just after Gray had died, leaving her to drift about the isthmus untethered. Whatcha doing? Catching octopuses to pickle? Can I give you a hand? And just like that she and Poppy had become friends.